Five years ago, the Good Dirt Community Garden was just another patch of lawn on the very edge of a small town in Southern Illinois. When you look outward, away from the buildings, a huge sky opens up above fields of industrial corn and soybeans.
Over the course of a single weekend in June 2022, Good Dirt Community Garden volunteers completely transformed the area. We laid down cardboard and wood chips as a base layer to keep down grass and weeds, outlined the garden’s boundaries with a sturdy wooden fence, and trucked in mounds of compost and topsoil to create a couple of dozen garden plots. Today, the garden flourishes. Flowers, vegetables, fruits, herbs, tallgrass prairie plants, and even perhaps a few weeds all grow vigorously in our little patch.
Since we began, the garden has added a three-bin composting system, a tool shed, and a seating area, all built by volunteers. The garden simply would not exist without the generous contributions of those volunteers, financial gifts from community members, the use of the grounds at Edwardsville’s YMCA Meyer Center, the dedication of my fellow garden co-manager, Mary Grose, and the ongoing support of Seed St. Louis.
Seed St. Louis, a wonderful organization that serves over 250 local gardens and orchards, subsidizes a lot of our supplies. When we need a particular piece of gardening equipment, like a broadfork for aerating the soil, they will lend it to us. Their highly knowledgeable staff members hold educational talks on a variety of topics – one particularly helpful demonstration showed us how to winterize our garden beds to encourage healthy insect populations and discourage pests. With their support, we were able to build and install a raised bed to provide a more accessible option for gardeners.
Many of our members are relatively new to gardening, myself included, and it’s been very rewarding to be part of a group dedicated to so many different versions of experimentation and hands-on learning. Many of our other gardeners are a font of experience and expertise. I have come to realize that gardening can sometimes be as simple as putting some seeds in the ground, and at other times more complex than I could have imagined, requiring careful attention to weather, water, timing, pruning, and everything in between. The community garden gives us all space to pursue gardening at our own pace and in our own style, all while observing and learning from each other.
To make sure we have the chance to catch up with one another, we host two potlucks a year for gardeners to swap techniques, share our bounty, and enjoy the garden in various seasons. We are lucky to have some excellent cooks and bakers among the gardeners. Some of our members have kids, and it’s such a treat to see them excited to pick ripe Sungold tomatoes and learn about which plants are undesirable weeds (so they know which ones they’re allowed to gleefully yank out of the dirt). We collect feedback from members at the end of each season, planting the seeds of new ideas for improving the garden next year.
In addition to cultivating our personal green thumbs, it is important to us that the garden serves other facets of our community. A significant section of the garden is devoted to native pollinators, and we are proud to be part of the nationwide Pollinator Pathway. The garden is open to tours for students and community groups of all ages. We love teaching about which plants bees and butterflies need to thrive, how to grow fruits and vegetables without harmful chemicals, and the joy of getting your hands dirty!
Good Dirt Community Garden dedicates a significant section of its plots to native pollinators and welcomes students and community groups to learn how to grow food without harmful chemicals and which plants bees and butterflies need to survive. Photo courtesy of the Good Dirt Community Garden.
We have plots dedicated to growing vegetables for the local food pantry’s Brown Bag Buddies program, which provides free lunches for kids over the summer, as well as the Beet Box, a roving farmer’s market that expands access to locally grown free and low-cost produce for folks across the St. Louis Metro East.
The Good Dirt Composting Collective is a sister grassroots organization to the garden. Through the collective, we’ve taught composting workshops at the garden, local schools, libraries, festivals, Scout events, civic organizations, and at Willoughby Heritage Farm (in nearby Collinsville, IL). The garden is the perfect place to host workshops because we can give live demonstrations at our very active compost bins. Each season, we generate enough compost to cover all our beds for the winter in rich, nutrient-dense material.
Even though our garden isn’t the largest, we still manage to have a slew of projects running at any given time. We are so grateful to have had all kinds of labor donated by volunteer groups from local churches, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE) student organizations, Scout troops, and others. We also receive a wide variety of material donations. Last year, the Edwardsville High School Agriculture Department donated a huge number of tomato and pepper plant starters, and we sourced our cardboard from a local bicycle shop. It’s very heartening to know that even if they don’t end up gardening with us, so many people around town have lent a hand by toting wheelbarrows full of wood chips, repairing our hose reel, donating spare trellises and tomato cages, and contributing to the garden in innumerable other ways.
The Good Dirt Community Garden truly is a community-wide aspiration, and every season uncovers new rewards and challenges (all too often squash-bug- or Japanese-beetle-related). We all cherish the garden, and we will continue to find new ways to weave our work into the larger social and environmental ecosystems of Southern Illinois and beyond.
